Reading Proficiency Quotes

I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a relatively slow reader.

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

I never really thought I had an extensive vocabulary like that, and I'm not an avid reader. I didn't read a lot growing up - at all.

What I'm really addicted to is getting people to understand that if their kids aren't competent readers coming out of middle school, it's really going to be hard for them in high school.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.

I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.

One of the things that amazes me is the amount of functional illiteracy in this country... people can't read to get around, or people who can't read the newspaper but can barely read street signs.

I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

I'm a slow reader.

Let's put in place programs to ensure that all of our children are reading by third grade.

Obviously I had gone all through high school and into college, and you don't do that not knowing how to read.

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

If children are reading well by the 3rd or 4th grade then everything else works.

Acquiring literacy is an empowering process, enabling millions to enjoy access to knowledge and information which broadens horizons, increases opportunities and creates alternatives for building a better life.

Too many of our children cannot read. Reading is the building block, and it must be the foundation for education reform.

I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

President Bush said that our kids must be taught how to read. He said if his aides never learned to read, they'd never be able to tell him what's in the newspapers every day.

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.